


Reign of the Horned Mother

by Two_many_rs



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft
Genre: Blood, Blood and Gore, Cthulhu Mythos, Cults, Gen, Gen Work, Horror, Investigations, Lovecraftian, Murder, Mystery, Original Character(s), Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:08:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26031646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Two_many_rs/pseuds/Two_many_rs
Summary: Harold Ricksson travels to his quiet, Midwestern hometown and stumbles on the town's dark secret that could doom the world.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	1. Homecoming

I  
It was a regular Sunday in the middle of autumn, as the leaves were just turning orange and the laziest had begun to dance slowly to the ground, when I got the call that my brother was found dead in the downstairs dining room of his two story house. The police said little over the phone, but from what I have gathered since then through various news clippings and reports, the police’s arrival on the scene went something very close to the following.   
The Greensin police department received a call at 2:37 in morning from my brother’s next door neighbor, an old woman that he always told me was a pleasant widow who made excellent peanut butter cookies she was more than happy to share. The call reported shadowy figures lapping around the property before there was the sound of shattering glass. That was when the old neighbor called the police. While she was on the phone with the police department she heard shouting voices, crashing furniture, and then a long period of silence. It was then that the ground shook and rattled her house. I’ve checked every log and report produced by everywhere earthquakes are tracked from that time and not a single one of them reports one occurring in that area on that day.   
When the police arrived at the house they found a scene almost too terrible to describe. By the time they arrived the shadowy figures had evaporated into the night. Their approach was slow, and it took them just over half an hour to make it into the interior of the house. When they found my brother’s body it was splayed across a dining room table like it was at a coroner’s office. Blood was splattered all over the room like a fresh layer of paint. There was an incision running along the right side of his abdomen that slowly oozed the red substance down the side of the thick oak table and onto the carpeted floor below.   
The body itself was pale, blue veins visibly forming a road map that slightly raised the taut skin. It was as if he had been drained of blood completely through a second incision that ran horizontally across the inside of his left thigh. It ran down to his femur, slicing clean through his femoral artery and had spilled his blood like a water faucet. There were signs of a struggle that had begun upstairs.   
The path of wreckage suggested that the struggle started in the bathroom connected to my brother’s bedroom where the mirror was shattered and the bowl of the toilet was cracked with a spider web of hairline fractures. From there the struggle progressed through the bedroom, where sheets were strewn about and torn, a nightstand had been exploded into dozens of woodens shards. It continued down stairs, indicated by the stripped wall paper and fist sized holes punched through the drywall. Then it traveled down to the living room where his new plasma TV had been tipped off its stand and shattered its screen on the floor, leaving a myriad twinkling shards scattered across the floor. The couch was tipped backwards on the wreckage’s path towards the kitchen. In the kitchen three knives were missing from the holder, each one discarded on the tile flooring with blood that wasn’t my brother’s. The oven door was pulled all the way open, and the faucet was torn halfway off its spot on the sink.   
And then it ended with my brother laid atop the table where he was dissected like a lab rat. The most peculiar detail, however, was that when the police came back a few hours later to search for more evidence my brother’s body was gone, revealing a series of alien writings etched into the top of the table composed of alien structures and eldritch symbols.   
II  
So, it was the next day that I boarded a plane from Seattle to the Greenside airport on the northside of town. The runway was almost indistinguishable from the surrounding farm fields. The town itself was nested in central northern Minnesota and boasted the largest population of the surrounding counties. Its sign boasted 22,000 residents, although it hadn’t been updated in a decade. It was a rundown town built around a t-shaped layout of two main roads. The buildings were long ignored, their facades and interiors being slowly chipped away by the never stopping defacing chisel of time.   
The airport was no exception. Built in the mid-70s, the airport wore its garishly colored personality on its sleeve. Faded fluorescent orange carpet with red tentacles weaving through it was accompanied by walls bearing wood panelling and bead curtains. It was divided into two wings, the Hendrix Wing to the west and the Mystery Wing to the east. They both extended out of a central circular hub that was adorned with a gigantic electric lava lamp that had not worked since three months after its installation in 1981. A quick glance at either of the wings was enough to immediately identify their namesakes. The Hendrix Wing, self-explanatory enough, was covered from floor to ceiling with Jimi Hendrix memorabilia. There were duplicate vinyl records of everything he had ever released, a signed guitar, large portraits and posters, and enough various collectibles and displays to convince anyone that Hendrix himself had blessed Greensin, or even somewhere within 50 miles, with his presence. He had, in fact, never done so.   
The Mystery Wing’s threshold was dominated by an enormous statue of the mystery machine from Scooby-Doo. It stood, reaching over a dozen feet high and balanced on one tire in the middle of a spin out with each of the star characters hanging out of various windows. It all was covered in chipped and faded paint, the lead bases beneath poking through the gaps in dull gray blobs. The rest of the wing was covered in paraphernalia for the show and other famous Hannah-Barbera productions. Famous cartoon characters, backgrounds, even original cels from the animation were plastered haphazardly over the walls in a brazen disregard for local fire codes.   
The airport funneled people into twenty different gates, and if that seems like too many for a town the size of Greensin that would be because it is. Even when I arrived the airport was almost entirely abandoned of people arriving or departing. Many of the gates were empty, which is the only state I had ever seen many of them at the time, and the long hallways were nearly sparsely inhabited as well. It was convenient for travelling, for sure, but there was an eeriness to it all that I have yet to find matched elsewhere. The empty storefronts that lined the building, either abandoned due to lack of business or having never been claimed to begin with, were like abandoned shells, each one nothing more than an infinite black void beyond its metal gate fronting. Even with the handful of people also arriving in the Mystery Wing no more than fifty yards away from me in all directions I could not shake the feeling of loneliness from creeping in.   
It was definitely home.   
III  
I rented a modest car from the lot next to the airport that shared its parking lot. It was a simple four door sedan, brown in color with cigarette burns dotted hecticly across the fabric seats. The windows trapped in an inescapable strong odor of lemon cleaner that burned the nostrils. So, I drove through Greensin with the windows down as low as they could go. The wind whipped through the car like it was mad, tousling my hair and attempting to drown out the radio with its incessant whistling. I turned the radio up higher. The synthetic beats it blared felt strangely comforting and helped to subdue the surreal feeling that returning had introduced to my breast. At least here the music was the same.   
Everything else about the town was the same but wasn’t at the same time. The town, in its entirety, was completely different to Seattle. The buildings were stout, angular and spaced out with plenty of room to breathe. Wherever I looked my gaze was filled with abandonment. Stores that were left empty, the dark lines of dirt outlining where the outer edges of their signs had been, readable to anybody in the know. Other buildings were old and withering with age. The roads were covered with cracks and deep potholes that threatened the tires and axles of passing cars. The people were slow moving, hunched in form, scowled in countenance, proudly wearing bigoted political beliefs splattered across their shirts and hats with catchy slogans and epithets. Nothing was new, but it was all the same. It was exactly as I had left it; it was exactly why I had left it. The air still bore the stench of manure, dust, and old ideas. The hangout spots which I had bounced between when growing up were still filled with adolescents, only they wore baggy clothing with bleached hair rather than ratty flannels and torn jeans. The high school boasted its upcoming homecoming dance with the same theme it had repeated my four years on the same plastic sign in front of the building. The only difference was the thick layer of mildew that had sprouted out of its top.   
It was only a ten minute drive to my brother’s house, but it felt as if it took eons. When he arrived it was just as it was years ago when I had last visited. Perfectly trimmed grass, chipped paint, rotted shingles, and a porch that bowed slightly without any weight on it.   
But then I heard a voice.


	2. Thoughts of Days Past

I  
The voice came from beneath me. From the ground. It rose from deep within the earth’s core, entered as vibrations through my feet, hijacked my blood vessels, and rode them through my heart and deep into the recesses of my subconscious. The voice was a mere whisper, a slight tangential carried fluttering on a piercing but passing breeze. It was a harsh voice. One scarred by passing eons and guttural chants. It was the voice of something that time had tried to forget; something that the universe had rejected, banished it to another place where its cancerous terribleness could not spread as its nature dictated it would.   
And the voice said, “Boot culls here gear”. It was gibberish and it passed in a fleeing second. Regardless, the gibberish sent a bolt of shock and unfiltered terror coursing through my body. For an instant my body went silent, rejecting my mind and control over it as an alien presence that held no sway over my physical composition. My mind raced, playing the words over and over again in my mind. Rearranging them. Thinking them backwards. Jumbling the words up and seeing what else those mysterious letters could possibly assemble.   
But, then I stopped. The words were seemingly purged from my memory, leaving only a void in my chest as though something dear to me had been torn from my clawing arms. I could tell that I had lost something, but it was beyond any of my efforts to recollect just what had been lost. It would be days before I would remember what had been taken from me.   
So, with a melancholic heart, I headed soberly into my brother’s house. It was not so simple as walking in through either of the couplet of doors that led into the structure, as those doors had been locked by the leaving police force for Lord only knows what purpose. No, it was required of me to drive a limb through one of the first floor windows before dragging myself through the new threshold. It was not an act completely unfamiliar to me as a consequence of my delinquent past, but it was an action that I carried out without thought. It was as if I was simply observing a screen with my eyes while somebody, or something, else controlled the body.   
I walked, or was led, across the dining room that I had broken into to the opposite wall where I flipped a light switch upwards. The lone bulb, hanging at the end of a long tangle of exposed wiring from the faux wood ceiling, crackled to life slowly. A lump surged in my throat as I suppressed the desire to retch.   
The table at the center of the room was covered with dried blood that highlighted the terrible etchings so crudely depressed on its surface. They were sporadic and angular, with seemingly no structure to them to decipher. No matter their intelligible nature, however, they carried an air of much weight and importance around them. I found myself transfixed, only realizing the state of which I was when I snapped back to my normal self many minutes later. I will never know just how long I was standing there, but there was subsequently an immense pressure pounding in my head.   
The acrid stench of the dried blood was beginning to make my mind fuzzy, so I stumbled backwards out of the room and into my brother’s living room. It was thus that started me on my search of his entire house. My investigation was pain-staking and thorough, and it proved as fruitful as it did befuddling. A large portion of my findings were the standard droll of an American man living in a home in 2003. That means a rather large stack of bills, credit card advertisements, unsolicited department store catalogues and coupon booklets. Accompanying this was a collection of young adult novels, pulp films, and a hidden box of pornos.   
The first of my more notable finds was a stack of papers that at first glance seemed to be incoherent notes and nondescript doodlings. Upon further inspection, however, I found them to be what appeared to be rough drafts, notes referencing archaic readings, and practice sessions of the same eldritch script that chilled me so atop the dining room table. They looked painstakingly assembled, with wide dark lines that dug deep in the paper and had clearly been repeated a multitude of times.   
The second notable artifact amongst his personal desk was a small leather bound journal, just a bit smaller than my flattened hand, that was a dark olive color embossed with the words “Live, Laugh, Love” in a swirling cursive script. The outward appearance of this modest journal was perhaps just as strange and alien to me as the contents discovered within. Never would I have conjectured that my brother, an ex-marine factory worker whose only lover greater than beer was heternormative sex, would ever willingly purchase such a befuddling piece of tat.   
The strangeness of the journal’s contents began immediately on the first page, or rather the inside of the moleskin front cover. Inside, written again in thickened black lines, and this time underlined haphazardly as well, were five names that seemed familiar to me, but the origins of which I was unable to recall. The names were as follows: Jason Ortez, Melanie Florida, Jumbo Delilah, Alexander Snitch, and simply Junior. I pondered on the names for quite a long time and only moved on to the contents of the journal proper once I was sure that I would be unable to place even a single one of the assuredly Greensin resident names.   
A surprising percentage of the journal was filled, albeit mostly with wild scribbles composed of gigantic scratchy fonts. I started by reading every page, where it seemed to be a dream journal of sorts. The first entry was dated just more than six months prior and told of a horrible dream that included my brother stranded on a sailboat all alone during a terrible storm. To my knowledge, my brother has never set foot on a sailboat, much less alone. As such, the storm shook him in his dream most terribly. For what felt like hours he cowered atop the deck, clutching at the masts, rigging, and whatever else his claws could wrap themselves around.   
It was then that a voice called out to him from the depths of the ocean. It was deep a growly, like the sound of a mountain splitting it two, but tinged with a tone of femininity. It called out from below with a creaking timbre that called out his name in a slow, even tempo not so different from the heartbeat of a man mere minutes away from death. It was then that the rain, which had been pelting the boat in a constant barrage much like hellfire, turned to spiders as big as my brother’s fist. The ones that landed on the boat scuttled towards him, fangs shimmering in the rays of moonlight that sliced through the clouds, while the ones that landed in the water swam towards the boat with their spindly legs.   
It did not take long for the spiders to sink a thousand fangs through my brother’s flesh, causing him to wake up. The preceding journal entries were similar scenes of paranoia and madness, with each decreasing in its verbosity as it increased in the chaos of its penmanship. So, it was after only the first three entries that I began to jump through the journal, only stopping on a handful of random entries along the breadth of its timeline. By the time I reached the end of the journal the entries were hardly coherent at all, with many of them only being a few sparse words scrawled down rather than a coherent thought.   
It was just after I finished reading through the last entry, which was simply the words horned, spiders, thousand, and eternal listed out erratically, that the shrill beckon of my cell phone split through the still atmosphere of the house, causing me to jump and drop the journal in fright.   
II  
The weather had turned poor by the time I parked my rental car into a visitor space outside the front of the Greensin Police Department. The sun was muted by a layer of rebellious gray clouds that drizzled a steady, if insignificant, procession of cold rain drops. A stabbing breeze whipped through the nearly empty streets of the city as I wrapped my arms tightly around my chest and headed for the front door of the station. The call at my brother’s house had startled me, but I had been able to get little information from it as the call had suddenly cut off shortly after it had begun as my phone completely lost signal.   
“Harold?” a man’s lilted voice stopped me. “Holy shit, Harold Ricksson?”   
I stopped in my tracks and turned to see Tommy Delanor walking towards me from the other side of the street, an old friend from high school. He stood just a few inches shorter than my height, but even through the bulky black hoodie he was wearing I could tell that he had maintained his muscular physique over the years. His faded dark brown hair cut was well groomed and was matched by a thick full beard that covered a squarish chiseled jawline. HIs cheekbones were sharp, outlining his bright eyes that protruded slightly from his small forehead. He jogged towards me from the other side of the road with short, jerking movements and a dopishly large smile on his face.   
“I’ll be damned it is you. How’s it going, brother?” Tommy said as he wrapped his arms around me in the quick flash of a hug. He looked around sheepishly after he left the embrace.   
“It’s going as well as it can I suppose,” I said meekley. To be honest, I was happy and even excited to run into Tommy, but was unable to stop seeing the grizzly sight I had found at my brother’s house. The journal sat heavy in the back pocket of my trousers.   
“What are you doing in town?” he asked as if he hadn’t noticed, or simply didn’t care, about my poor demeanor.   
“My...brother died.”  
His face sank. “Oh, shit, yeah I think I might have heard about that.” He shook his head like a cartoon character. “Sorry, I can’t believe I didn’t even think of it before coming over here like a jackass.”  
“No, it’s really good to see you.” I didn’t sound as reassuring as I had hoped. He looked past me towards the police station as if he was just seeing it now for the first time.  
“Here for your brother?” he asked with a weak jab of one hand towards the station’s front door.  
“Ye-yeah I am. I haven’t been in town long enough to get into any trouble I guess.” I offered up a weak chuckle. He nodded. It seemed as though he hadn’t heard me.  
“What, ah…,” he trailed off briefly before trying again, “Well, do you know what happened to him? If you don’t mind talking about it at least.”   
I shook my head to indicate that I didn’t, but I did. “He ah...well, he was found dead. It seems like a murder, but I obviously haven’t seen much and I just got in so the police hasn’t given me much information to go off of, ya know?”   
“Murder? Here in Greensin? Jesus that’s crazy man.” He placed his rough hand on my shoulder in an attempt at consolation, but it just felt awkward. Like we were in the commercial for a movie on the Hallmark channel. “I’m not surprised these fucking pigs aren’t doing anything about it though, right?”   
I forced myself to chuckle along with him. An awkward silence settled in between us. The only sound was the light sprinkles hitting the concrete and the wind that whistled between the surrounding buildings. I wanted to say something, anything, but the images of my brother were plastered over my eyes.   
“Well, it seems like the storm is picking up a bit,” Tommy said as he looked up at the sheet of clouds. It wasn’t. “How about I letcha get going, huh?”   
I nodded, “Yeah, I guess so. I should probably get in there too. They called me in and everything after all.”   
He nodded, “Yeah, definitely. Well it was really good seeing you Harold.”  
“Likewise.”   
“Hey, how long are you in town for?”   
“I’m not sure. However long it takes to sort out my brother’s affairs.”  
He nodded and paused in his retreat back to the other side of the street. “Well, if you’re not too busy, how about we get a drink in a couple days here? It’d be great to catch up.”  
“That’d be nice.”  
“You still have my number?”   
“I think it’s in my phone.”  
Tommy nodded one last time before giving a weak wave and turning around to jog back across the street. My eyes followed and I let out a heavy sigh once he was out of sight. I pushed my hands hard into the front pockets of my trousers and continued towards the front door of the Police Station.


	3. Detective Ramble

I.   
The interior of the police station was as dead as the mom-and-pop pharmacy that had closed down in Greensin twenty years ago when Walgreen’s invaded town. Just inside of the double glass front doors was a large horseshoe shaped desk with a bored looking middle-aged man behind it. His head rested on one closed fist, pushing the loose dark skin of his face up into rolls like a disgruntled pug. His eyes were closed and his wide shoulders slowly rose and tumbled back down in an even tempo.  
I shook the loose rain off of my jacket and pants and looked back over my shoulder at the rain that had turned to an absolute pour outside. I scoffed a chuckle, hoping that it would wake him up and appear as if it were an accident. It was impolite to ask people to do their jobs in Greensin.   
“Uh-hello?” I said monotone after my first attempt became a clear failure. His eyelids peeled back like a lizard’s to reveal the bloodshot orbs beneath. His head lifted up heavily, straining the thin neck beneath, and quickly sunk back to its place atop the chapped knuckles.   
“Can I help you, sir?” he grumbled impatiently.   
“Yes, my name is Harold Ricksson.” Blank eyes stared back in the void of a response. “I got a call earlier today requesting I come into the station to speak with a...detective Ramble?” Blankness. Was he still breathing? “You see, my brother was found dead in his house-”  
He cut me off with a jab of his free hand over his right shoulder. “Detective Ramble is down that hall. Third door on the left. Can’t miss it.”   
I nodded in awkward thanks and started passing the desk. The sharp slap of brittle plastic on wood. I turned toward the desk, where a fluorescent green clipboard had appeared.   
“You have to sign in.”   
I nodded again and signed the yellowing print out attached to the clipboard with a hasty, nearly illegible scribble. The man stared at me the entire time, his faded eyes threatening to disappear in a dramatic roll towards the back of his unused cranium at any second.   
Half of the lights dotting the ceiling of the hallway were burnt out, leaving the corridor in near darkness. I followed it down to the third door on the left, just as he had said. On the oak door the name “Jack Finch” was embossed on a nameplate that slid into a small metal holder. Detective Ramble’s door was two more down the hall and to the right. I delivered a short series of sharp raps of my knuckles against the door. A grumbling voice responded in a way that made what it had said impossible to decipher, but I assumed that it was an agreement for me to enter and opened the door.   
The inside of the office was obfuscated in a thin veneer of milk-white smoke that was steadily pouring out of the end of a long cigarette haphazardly perched on the edge of a blue ceramic ashtray. The small office was dominated by a large metal desk that was bolted to the ceramic tiles below. It was a dull gray with several dents on the side closest me. The top was covered with a pile of paperwork, brown-stained coffee mugs adorned with GPD emblems, and discarded plastic bottles of cheap booze. The walls were hidden behind walls of crooked frames of children’s drawings, a couple displays of medals, newspapers with Ramble’s name in the headline, and a large painting of some woods that looked like it belonged in the clearance aisle at a department store.   
“Huh?” the man who I assumed was Ramble grunted without looking up towards me. He sat, hunched over the desk in a torn up old leather office chair. The window behind him was open, letting droplets of water freely blow into the room, leaving wet splotches on the top of his shoulders that were covered by his cliche trench coat. His hair was a black clump of curls that glistened from ineffective gel while hanging forward in an unkempt clump.   
“Well?” Ramble said irritated as he looked up towards me. His face was lean and handsome despite dark bags under his eyes that betrayed how exhausted he was. Stubble dotted his narrow jawline and the bright redness of his thin lips popped out next to his pale skin. One dark eyebrow perked up over its associated gray eye expectantly.   
“Oh, sorry. I’m-ah, I’m Harrold Ricksson,” I said clumsily.   
“Oh,” Ramble said with a squint. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was disappointed. “Well, please, have a seat Harold. Harry?”   
“Harold.”  
“Harold. Please, have a seat. This might take a little while.”   
I obeyed and sat down in a red plastic chair that was much too small for my size. It creaked under my weight and felt horribly familiar.   
“Well, Mr. Ricksson, before I start asking you any questions that I may have I like to give people an option to ask any that they have. I know this must be a very…” he trailed off briefly as he dug around in a hidden desk drawer, “difficult and emotional time for you, but I want to offer you as much as I am.” He looked up at me and offered a low effort smile.   
“Um...none that I can think of at the moment I guess,” it hit me that the chair was taken from my old middle school, most likely a relic from when the new building was built a few years prior. “Well, I have quite a few, but I’m sure they’re questions you would have told me the answers to by now if you knew them.”  
Detective Ramble offered a sympathetic nod. “I understand.” He emerged from behind the desk and set down a manila folder to the left of himself on a pile of papers accompanied by a legal pad and pen on his right. “Well, if you don’t mind then, I’d like to begin my questioning.”   
I nodded my consent.  
“Good,” Ramble cleared his throat loudly and rubbed at his eyes with his thumbs. “You grew up here in Greensin with your brother, correct?”  
“That’s right.”  
“Did you ever notice anything strange while you were growing up here?” Ramble said as he picked up his pen and looked at me anxiously.   
“Strange how?”  
“Just anything that you would have difficulty explaining now looking back, or anything that may seem like it was suspicious.”  
“Do you think that what happened to my brother is tied to our childhood somehow? We didn’t get into anything if that’s your line of reasoning,” I was beginning to feel insulted.  
Ramble shook his head. “No, I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just doing my best to be as thorough as possible. Now-”  
I cut him off, “Thorough? The amount of shit you and your guys left at his house sure didn’t seem thorough.” An obvious mistake looking back.   
His eyebrows perked and he straightened his back. “You went into his house? Past the police tape that marked it off as an active crime scene?”   
I immediately knew that I had fucked up and gave an embarrassed nod.   
Ramble rubbed his eyes with his thumbs once more and reached for one of the plastic bottles that still had a few inches of amber colored liquid at the bottom. “Well, I’m sorry you had to see that place. Need a drink?”   
I shook my head, trying to gauge where the conversation was headed from this unexpected reaction.   
“Suit yourself,” Ramble muttered as he poured some for himself after a quick glance into a dirty coffee mug to make sure it wasn’t too dirty. “Well, did you find anything of interest there?”  
“Not really. Just a dream journal that doesn’t seem too important,” I lied.   
“Yeah, there definitely aren’t many clues it doesn’t seem. Tell me though, how often did you talk to your brother?” His eyes disappeared behind the cup as he drank it down in a single effort.   
“We’d call each other probably once every other week or so.”   
“Did he ever say anything to you recently about anything going on Greensin? Anything about anybody he was meeting with or groups he was attending or strange new business?”  
That word again. Strange. “No, he hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary.”  
Ramble’s disappointment was obvious on his face.   
“Why? Is something going on?”   
He let out a sigh. “I really can’t discuss open cases, but...I suppose this is town gossip more than anything else.”  
I waited as he poured and drank another drink before pouring himself a third.   
“There is something going on in Greensin. I don’t know what it is yet, but it is big and it is evil. I wouldn’t normally tell you that I think it likely has some connection to what happened with your brother, but I’m afraid that if it does you could very well be in danger here.” He reached into another drawer behind the desk before leaning over it to hand me a small card. “Here’s my number, okay? If you see anything suspicious or that makes you curious or uncomfortable, anything, just give me a call and I”ll drop everything and be right there. I promise.”  
I was beginning to feel unnerved. There was an intensity to his words that gave them a severe weight behind them. I nodded in agreement and took the card.   
“We have your brother’s phone and wallet that were on his body. You can pick them up from the evidence locker on the other side of the building. I’m also going to give you the information of the funeral home in town here so that you can’t start making your arrangements.”  
“Thank you,” I said as I stood from the desk and began leaving the office. As I left I heard Ramble grumble something from behind me. “Huh?” I turned back to face him.  
“Just be careful Harold. And make sure you fucking call me if you see anything. I’m getting tired of all these bodies turning up.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! The next chapter will be up on September 11, 2020.


End file.
